Winter needs a low-sodium diet. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Every winter across most of the northern US, giant bags of salt materialize at grocery stores and home improvement retailers as residents and business owners prepare to combat icy sidewalks and slick driveways. But when it comes to salting walkways and parking lots, most people overdo it, which costs more than just cash; using too much salt can have surprisingly harmful effects on the local environment, water quality, and human health. When salt is applied to roads and sidewalks as a deicing agent, as snow melts, salt gets washed into streams, lakes, and wetlands.

The "quantum chandelier" that sits within a glass box in the chapel at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's campus in Troy, New York, is the symbolic centerpiece of an ambitious effort to turn upstate New York into an advanced technology center – what Silicon Valley is to social media or Cambridge, Massachusetts, is to biotech. The silver sci-fi object, named for interior gold lattices that suspend, cool and isolate its processor, is the heart of a "quantum computing system" that could herald a new age of computing. It's the centerpiece of the dream Curtis Priem, a co-founder of Nvidia, the 2.8tn artificial intelligence hardware and software company, has of turning Rensselaer, or RPI, into an advanced computing hub and refashioning this area of upstate New York into a new Silicon Valley. Priem has invested a sizable chunk of his fortune into building the Curtis Priem Quantum Constellation – a workshop for RPI students' vision of a quantum computing future. Just as his partners at Nvidia, where he was the company's first chief technology officer, gave him the freedom to imagine graphics chip architecture that powers the AI revolution, he hoped his investment will spark a new era of computer-powered innovation in the region.